The Torchlight Website announces
the release of Torchlight, the new action/RPG from Runic Games (thanks
A51Abductee). They describe some issues they've had to overcome, which means they
are not offering the playable demo just yet, but the demo can be acquired
through Steam. The full
game is available from Runic Games
as well as GamersGate,
Steam, and
WildTangent. Here's a
bit of the official description of the game:

The adventure is set in the
mining settlement of Torchlight, a boomtown founded on the discovery of rich
veins of Ember – a rare and mysterious ore with the power to enchant or corrupt
all that it contacts. This corruptive power may have dire consequences however,
and players set out into the nearby mountains and depths below to discover the
full extent of Ember’s influence on the civilizations that have come before.

Players will choose from among three character classes, and venture from the
safety of the town of Torchlight into randomly generated dungeon levels, with a
huge variety of creepy monsters, endless variations of loot to find, and quests
to complete. The endless randomization ensures a long-lived gameplay experience.

Loving this game so far. Given the price-tag, this game is Steal Of The Year! In addition, and I can't quite put my finger on why, but I'm actually liking it far more than Titan Quest, Immmortal Throne included. It has some of that indefinable Diablo magic that TQ completely lacked for me. I think it's part controls, part stats/itemization and of course the music. Something about TQ just never felt "right". Torchlight does; so far. That's not to say it doesn't have some issues of course, but that brings us back to the pricetag which makes it easy to overlook most of them.

Small tip for new players, since you can't change difficulties without creating a new character: Go for hard or very hard immediately. Normal seems ridiculously easy, at least up until level 7 or so, where I restarted and increased the difficulty. Decided to go for very hard after some experimentation on the first level, and currently level 14 with my bowazon (or whatever it's called in Torchlight). Haven't run into any serious brick-walls so far.